Scelsi: Konx-Om-Pax, part 2

[This section was not commissioned by the San Francisco
Symphony for their program notes, but is nonetheless some discussion
I wanted to add. As it turned out, most of the first paragraph
below was actually included as part of an introduction to the
program. Beyond that, this full article would have been both longer
than they wanted, as well as more speculative than might have been
appropriate. This part takes up immediately upon the conclusion
of the previous part, to form one longer
essay.]

Konx-Om-Pax is typical of Scelsi's work in its mythological
character, and in the almost universal force with which it seems
to will itself out of silence. It is elemental in sonority, like
an unstoppable force of nature. Nonetheless, especially given the
programmatic subtitle, it is tempting to perceive a more personal
narrative. It opens with the self-confident C, asserting itself
boldly and almost naïvely with no sense of consequence. The
action of the C itself, the forces inherent to its nature, eventually
overcome its confidence and destabilize it. Next comes an influx
of powerful creative energy in the dynamic second movement. We
can view it as Scelsi's own transfiguration as a composer. In the
last movement, the "Om" chorus repeats itself, unperturbed
by the surrounding musical motion, except as regards loudness and
phrasing. It remains rock solid on its A and consequently on its
intent, and so despite the myriad activity and forces of the world
around it, maintains a state of inner peace. This is a relatively
simple interpretation, but one to which Konx-Om-Pax lends
itself. Ultimately, however, it is a work which expresses these
ideas very powerfully, and so finds its ultimate success in that
power.

Not only does it contain some of his most prototypical &
potent gestures, but Konx-Om-Pax occupies a clearly privileged
position within Scelsi's musical output as a whole. It concludes
what I have called the third period of
his musical production, and does so convincingly. After the more
conventional first period, and the more unsettled experimentation
of the second period, the third period contains much of Scelsi's
best (or at least most expansive) music. The works are of uniformly
high quality and clear expression. By the fourth period, Scelsi
had retreated even more into the truncated world of aphorism, and
at times his works from the 1970s can be too polished. A fine
example of this phenomenon is the next & final choral-orchestral
piece: Pfhat, written in 1974. Here a similar sequence of
illustrations is employed: Mundane reality destabilizes itself,
there is a creative injection, and then mystical revelation.
Pfhat is even more concise & severe than Konx-Om-Pax,
not to mention somewhat derivative, and so therefore clearly the
lesser work. Its impression rests more on "shock" value
in the last movement than on the deliberate exposition of
Konx-Om-Pax. The finely chiseled expression of Scelsi's
fourth period can, however, be quite effective in its own right.
In particular, the small string pieces continue to project a luminous
quality, one which may even be intensified by their economy. Scelsi
moved rather decisively from the orchestral idiom in his late work,
marking Konx-Om-Pax as at least one climax to his oeuvre.

Unlike Aion, Konx-Om-Pax
does not attempt a truly symphonic argument, at least not from the
perspective of rhetoric and dialectic. However, it is not a wholly
post-impressionist work either, as are so many of Scelsi's small-scale
fourth period works. Konx-Om-Pax illustrates something, to
be sure, but it does so in a more directly evocative way. It does
so in an indicative way, and the intent is clearly to lead
the listener along a path already traveled by the composer toward
a specific mystical revelation. In that sense, it does not fulfill
the impressionist ideal of an illustrated scene, and so consequently
one can suggest that Konx-Om-Pax makes a modified form of
symphonic argument, although a unitary one. Similar remarks hold
for some other significant works by Scelsi, such as his String
Quartet No. 4. The existence of the very terse "program"
does not really interfere with the symphonic idea, because the
program does not interfere with the directness of the abstract
expression. Of course, the underlying point to be illuminated is
also an abstract one, and so perhaps we have impressionist music
in the end, but a sort of modified "universal" or
meta-impressionism. Regardless, Konx-Om-Pax is not pretty,
it is ominous.

Scelsi takes heat in the press both for his situation with regard
to paid assistants transcribing his music, as well as for the
frequently clichéd quality of his Eastern mysticism. However,
the underlying counter-argument to these dismissive claims is the
integrity of the music itself. Scelsi projects a personal vision
throughout his oeuvre, and does so in music which is never pastiche.
Likewise, when it comes to material, Scelsi is effective.
Once his idiom is grasped, his music can be absolutely compelling
in its evocations and even devastating in its emotional impact.
One cannot take such facts lightly. As indicated, then, it is
Scelsi's "surrounding haze" of allusions which is
dilettantish, and not his music itself. From the technical
perspective, what Scelsi's music provides in terms of a coherent
structural role for timbre is epochal. This is precisely a topic
probed by the avant-garde, a topic which received considerable
but mostly unsatisfying attention, and a topic which suddenly had
a particularly personal resolution burst from obscurity in the
1980s with the "discovery" of Scelsi. From somewhat
before that time until his death shortly afterward, well-known
musicians such as Michael Tilson Thomas and Irvine Arditti, musicians
whose professional stature is unimpeachable, went to learn Scelsi's
music directly from him. That they came away with fully positive
impressions seals his stature, even leaving aside Scelsi's impact
on the noted avant-garde musicians of own circle: France-Marie
Uitti, Joëlle Léandre, Alvin Curran, and many others....
Scelsi was no crank.

When one of Scelsi's sounds begins, there is almost always a
sense that it is inhuman. The music has a raw, elemental sonority
which is part of what makes it so original. Simply put, it can
make one tremble, often for inexplicable reasons. The same was
true of Scelsi the man, as cellist France-Marie Uitti (famous for
her two-bow technique) recalls nearly fainting when she met him.
For me, as someone who has somehow become connected to Scelsi after
his death, if only in the sense of writing program notes for his
premieres, there is something forceful and persuasive about his
expression which cannot readily be described. When writing these
notes, predictably enough, I took out the
recording on Accord to listen while I wrote. I knew the piece...
every sound... so it was not something done to refresh my memory,
but just to have some appropriate background music. Nonetheless,
before it was over, I found myself shaking. Maybe this is a trick
of memory, an accident of hearing Konx-Om-Pax when my own
mind was supplying the subtext, and then identifying the response
with the music and reminding myself of that response by listening
again? How can an individual deny such explanations? One cannot
get outside of oneself to do so. Yet when multiple people
independently report similar responses, how can one deny that?
Is Scelsi's music simply something which speaks to some people and
not others, never others? I cannot answer this question either.
What I do know is that when Scelsi talks of reaching behind the
veil of mundane existence and plucking what is inside for all to
hear, I do hear it.

In works such as Konx-Om-Pax, Scelsi makes many of his
more eccentric and abstract ideas very concrete. While the solo
string works demand concentrated listening and attention to which
notes are played on which individual strings -- an innovation in
notation which was also part of a trend in the 1950s & 1960s
-- the more expansive orchestral works allow one to wallow in the
larger sound-compexes, if desired. Konx-Om-Pax does repay
close attention to the means by which sounds are transformed, or
in the case of the last movement not transformed, but it also allows
for easier appreciation of its general contours. It makes a direct
impression through its grandeur and its large-scale sonority. In
short, it is concert hall music. Whereas Scelsi's elemental sound
world frequently seems to be extracted from Tibet or Tuva, his use
of forms is frequently rather Western. His movements are clearly
defined and his musical phrases cadence in regular, if oblique,
ways. In works such as Konx-Om-Pax, not to mention the
string quartets or piano sonatas, he also utilized the standard
Western ensembles in relatively straight-forward ways. Scelsi's
grammar was mostly Western, even if his material was mostly Eastern.
Or were they?

Scelsi's act of fusion was at such a fundamental level that it
can be difficult to say which part is which. His music is never
a simple case of "foreign tunes" being put into sonata
form, as it were, and that one often cannot distinguish Eastern
from Western influences is one of its most profound strengths.
Scelsi's works use Western instruments almost exclusively. His
titles are frequently Eastern in some way. His sense of tonal
interplay reflects Eastern philosophy, but is usually expressed
with a Western sense of development. Despite some "evocations"
noted by others, even his late works do not follow e.g.
a raga from a grammatical
perspective. I insist that the grammar is Western, but that it is
expressed in an oblique domain of tonal fluidity which is the most
striking feature of its canvas. Scelsi's improvisational working
methods were at least Eastern-inspired. The sonorities of his
music, in spite of the instruments, are frequently Eastern. These
aspects are all found in Konx-Om-Pax, but as usual, they
are closely intermingled. The idea of mutating a single note
through timbral & microtonal shifts was decisively Scelsi's
own, however, and here it is expressed most clearly in the first
movement. That basic dynamic was the inspiration for his recovery,
and it became the fount for his act of fusion, allowing the Western
rhetorical dynamic to be subverted into a space small enough for
Eastern ideas to unfold. Ultimately, it is in the elegance and
mutual cogency with which the two musical worlds are wed that
Scelsi's greatest artistic contribution lies.